Senate President Mike Miller said the bipartisan oversight group composed of state lawmakers from the House and Senate will look at problems with the health care exchange, monitor progress and improvements and decide what should be done to fix the exchange moving forward.

The committee's work will include evaluating how the exchange is doing with the sale and purchase of qualified plans and outreach to eligible Marylanders.

State officials admitted Monday that some problems with the website will not be fixed by the March 31 deadline to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

The newly-formed joint oversight committee heard for the first time the state is seriously considering giving up on going it alone.

"These include adopting technology from another state, joining a state consortium, partnering with the federal exchange to use the back-end services or use the resources to make a major overhaul to our existing system," Maryland Secretary of Information Technology Isabel FitzGerald said.

Lawmakers received old news with a new price tag: The same problems plague the state system, including identification verification issues, locked accounts, lost data and the inability to provide real-time status of an application.

The state brought in new players to fix it, but at a price: The running tally of state dollars is $22 million. Committee members said they are also hearing for the first time that the cost of rollout and maintaining the system is going well beyond the initial $100 million to $200 million federal-dollar mark.

"Two-hundred-sixty million dollars through all these appropriations and we still don't have something that's working. I get that you're trying to work things behind the scenes, but I guess one key question that comes to that is why in the world are you still working with Noridian?" Senate Minority Leader David Brinkley said.

"Right now, we are focused on getting people coverage during the open-enrollment process. There is no path to dropping our prime contractor in the middle of open enrollment," Maryland Health Secretary Joshua Sharfstein said.

Sharfstein declined to comment on behind-the-scenes cost recovery efforts by the attorney general's office, citing the sensitive nature of the issue.

The group's first meeting comes in the wake of new information regarding what went wrong with the rollout. Court papers associated with a civil lawsuit between contractors charge that Noridian concealed its lack of relevant expertise when it bid on the job. Noridian said the claim is false.

Of the number of young people who signed up, 9 percent is between the ages of 18 to 25; 18 percent are between 26 and 34; slightly over a quarter of those registered are seniors. As of Feb. 1, 29,059 people enrolled. An early target was 147,000 by March 31. Lawmakers pressed for a commitment.

State officials said despite the problems, they plan to stick with the health exchange until the March 31 deadline.

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